Van Hollen, Khanna Launch Effort to Cut Trump Off From Funding His War on Iran

Progressive lawmakers are mounting a campaign to end the Trump administration’s war on Iran by cutting off funding for the effort and potentially forcing a government shutdown, after Democrats won a historic majority running against the unpopular conflict.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) are two figures leading the effort, which is akin to Congress’s efforts to end the Vietnam War, The Washington Sun reports.

The strategy would involve not just stripping funding for the war in existing legislation, but also adding stipulations barring appropriated funds from being used for war operations. This goes further than passing war powers resolutions, which the Trump administration would likely ignore. Analysts have said that the budget is one of the most powerful tools that lawmakers have to end the war.

With their sizable majority in both chambers of Congress, Democrats could force a showdown with President Donald Trump by forcing him to choose between ending his war or shutting down the government.

“I’m not planning to vote for anything that provides any funding to fuel the war in Iran,” Van Hollen said. “If the president wants to tell the country that he’s prepared to shut down the United States government in order to conduct an illegal and senseless war in Iran, that will be his choice.”

Some other Democrats have also voiced their support for the idea of using the power of the purse to end the war this week, including Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. Incoming Sen. Abdul El-Sayed (D-Michigan) has also said he would back such efforts.

Van Hollen and Khanna have said that the effort could be modeled after Congress’s effort to end the Vietnam War in 1973, when Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation that would cut off all funds for bombing Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam unless explicitly authorized by Congress; that same year, Congress passed the War Powers Act over President Richard Nixon’s veto.

Khanna wrote in a post on X on Wednesday that he thinks lawmakers should “[s]upport a continuing resolution prohibiting the financing of any combat activities of the U.S. military in Iran. End the Iran war like we did for Vietnam.”

The two lawmakers both said the effort should be forced as soon as possible. Funding for the federal government is currently set to expire on December 11. Republicans will still control the House and Senate until the new class of lawmakers is sworn in in January, but even some Republicans — including President Donald Trump himself — have lamented that the war was one of the top contributors to the blue “tsunami” this week.

Meanwhile, one of the lame duck Congress’s tasks before January is to consider the Pentagon budget bill for next year. Previous versions of the bill have contained $70 billion for the Iran war.

“It would be a betrayal of the voters to be complicit in keeping the war going,” Van Hollen said.

The effort may be the first test for Democratic leaders Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) as they vie to keep their leadership positions going into the new Congress.

Schumer, for his part, pledged in a news conference on Wednesday that “we are going to end the war,” adding: “The founding fathers had the power of the purse as one of the ways of deterring a president who does war without the consent of the American people.”

But both Schumer and Jeffries are vehemently pro-Israel and have previously, in their own ways, cheered the war.

This past June, Schumer criticized Trump’s signing of a deal with Iran to end the war as “the art of surrender.” Meanwhile, just a few days after the U.S. and Israel launched the war, Jeffries declined to rule out voting for a potential request from the Trump administration for Congress to grant more funding for the fighting.